Help with an experiment

nilanb

Born

Posts: 2

Loc: Amherst MA

3+ Months Ago

Dear Laptop User:

As part of a University research project on laptop battery use, we are
looking for people to install a non-intrusive logging tool, that runs on the
MAC and Windows XP, to gather data on your battery usage. It does not
collect any personally identifiable information, does not collect anything
in relation to websites, or even what network you may be connected to. It
also collects no information about location.

We would appreciate your participation in the study. The more data we
collect, the better the results of our work will be.

If you would like to participate in the survey, the tool can be
Downloaded from the "Monitoring Tool Download" tab at:

http://prisms. cs.umass. edu/~nilanb/ llama.html

More information:

Specifically, we are interested in when and how often you charge your
battery. The tool runs as a service or daemon without any user intervention
and uploads data to our server once a day. It creates no noticeable load,
or battery drain on your system, and has been run for months on dozens of
test machines without problems.

The tool collects 6 pieces of information:
1) The percentage of battery remaining
2) If the laptop is plugged in
3) The CPU load
4) The free disk space
5) if the machine is connected to the Internet
6) How long the machine has been idle with no user input.

The source code for the monitoring tool is also available at the same
Place as the download. The aggregated data will be released to the research
community after the study is complete.

There is also a short optional user-survey form that we would like you
To fill if you have couple of minutes to spare. It would be great if you
can help out with this experiment by installing the tool on your laptops
And filling up the user survey.